Empathy and social intelligence are key ingredients in promoting good quality relationships, both personally and professionally. The evolution of social intelligence and other ‘mind-reading’ skills account for much of the success of our species. They help foster understanding and co-operation. Children who are in relationship with empathic, emotionally intelligent parents and other family members also develop raised levels of empathy and emotional intelligence. Children who suffer abuse, neglect and rejection, whose parents possess low levels of empathy and social understanding, are less likely to develop healthy levels of social intelligence. This puts them at risk of experiencing stress in relationships. It also increases their chances of developing poor mental health, problematic social behaviour, and not dealing well with life stressors. High empathy and socially intelligent social workers are likely to establish good working relationships with their clients. A good working relationship, or therapeutic alliance, needs to be in place before the social worker can effectively deliver her service, provide support, advocate, give advice, administer treatment, or deliver an evidence-based practice.
 

Harm reduction in the social work with addicts – the Polish example

This paper focuses on the model of harm reduction from the perspective of social work. The first section presents key theoretical assumptions behind two strategies for helping persons addicted to psychoactive substances: a traditional one aimed at maintaining total abstinence, and the strategy under discussion, which is related to mitigating the consequences arising as a result of alcohol consumption or use of illicit drugs. Both these paradigms are treated as complementary, though in light of therapeutic actions (medical and psychological) from which they have originated and developed, they differ from each other among others in terms of their targets, how they define the aid relationship, their rules of providing aid and criteria for verifying its efficiency. Section two analyzes the relations between the concept of harm reduction and social work in its theoretical and practical dimensions. The existing literature on social work and, separately, on the theory of addiction, lacks any references to or research into the mutual influences of the harm reduction model and its application to social work. The above topic has not been examined in a systematic fashion so far, but rather it was limited solely to indicating certain related forms of actions taken in the community. This paper fills that gap and tries to make an assessment of the usefulness and significance of the above paradigm in the practice of social work with addicts, with a focus on the Polish welfare system.
 

Between the state of Israel independent declaration in 1948, until this very days, wars, military operations and on-going national terror had been its daily routine to cope with. The main goal of this study was to review published studies on the impact of those extreme negative life events on the well-being and mental health of various groups of Arab and Jewish civilians in Israel. In addition, this study emphasizes well-known PTSD risk factors related to terrorism, military operations and war in Israel, as well as dissociative symptoms, ASD symptoms, and Death anxiety. The study also deals with some of the background characteristics, the internal and the external resources of the individual, in three age groups, which can take the role of mediator variables between those negative events and the populations’ well-being. The literature published in Israel from the beginning of studding those subjects, available up to January 2017, was systematically reviewed. About thirteen studies on the impact of on-going terror attacks and risk factors for distress, trauma and PTSD and, about ten studies on coping strategies were identified. Causes, risk factors, variety of outcomes and coping strategies were widespread from the earlier and traditional to more recent and modern approaches towards those subjects and sometimes integrated.
 

Lone parenthood is not a new phenomenon but this problem touches growing group of people and is therefore more often chosen as the subject of research in the field of pedagogy, ­psychology, sociology and social work. In accordance to the reorganization in Poland in the 1980s, many social problems have been highlighted due to demographic, socio-economic in the labor market in Poland but also in Western Europe. In Poland since the 1990s the government changed its approach to its citizens, from the welfare state to a state which aims in the active social policy. The activities of this type of social policy refers to the ideas of social economy, the need to increase employment opportunities for vulnerable groups (e.g. people with disabilities) and persons who, for various reasons, are inactive (e.g. single mothers with children or the elderly). This concept is not new, it’s development started in Europe in the 1990s of twentieth century and is based, on the transformation of the welfare state into the decentralized and auxiliary state, that stimulate the development of social entrepreneurship and active citizenship with maintaining the principle of social solidarity in the face of the need to redefine social issues. One of the groups of clients of the social welfare system are single mothers who can count on financial, legal and social support from the social institutions. However, there are sometimes single women who are not entitled to these benefits. The paper discusses and analyses the legal and social problems of single women.
 

The oldest old – “inconvenient” clients for helping profession workers?

Observed and expected increases in number of people aged 80+ is reason to focus on their specific requirements towards helping profession workers. The oldest olds have specific health problems, communication needs, and they reach the final stage of their life. Each of the mentioned above characteristics is related with need for special professional competences of helping profession workers. The main aim of the paper is (1) presentation how demographic change will affect increase in needs for care for the oldest old; and (2) identification of specific problem of the subpopulation to underline professional requirement that should be met by the helping profession workers.
 

In permanently introducing this new section to our periodical, we wish to call the reader’s attention to a unique approach we are consciously taking. In a desire to identify impending foci in our fi eld, we have invited the youngest of our colleagues – MA and PhD candidates in social work – to act as our reviewers. Furthermore, considering the vast multitude of scholarly articles published annually, we have asked our students to primarily focus on this segment which is more likely to refl ect the most recent fi ndings. Th at said, we have not set a strict date range in the hope that our reviewers will freely discover or recover studies which might have been overlooked heretofore.

Zofia Markiewicz- Middleton Michael K., Housing, Not Handcuffs: Homeless Misrecognition and “SafeGround Sacramento’s” Homeless Activism. Communication, Culture & Critique. 2014. Vol.7: 320–337

Dominika Curyło- Browne, K. Falshaw, L. Street Children and Crime in the UK: A Case of Abuse and Neglect. Child Abuse Review. 1998.  Vol. 7: 241-253

Anna Paulweber -Timothy, P. W., Rogers, J. Rejecting “the child”, embracing “childhood”: Conceptual and methodological considerations for social work research with young people. International Social Work. 2014.  59 (6): 734-744.

Aleksandra Waszczuk-  Michael L Shier and John R Graham. Subjective well-being, social work, and the environment: The impact of the socio-political context of practice on social worker happiness. Journal of Social Work. 2015. Vol.15(1). 3-23.